


You're 11!

by cheloniidae



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2020-10-11 19:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20551451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: Four perspectives on Dylan Faden's first birthday in Bureau custody.





	1. Trench

The Bureau Heads meeting is suspiciously uneventful. No major containment breaches to discuss; no requests for extra funding or resources; no new Objects of Power; no changes in the Quarry. Even the Oldest House’s topology has been calm this week, only maiming one person with a building shift. It could be a rare chance for Trench to catch up on his backlog of reports, but more likely, it’s an ill omen. The Bureau is a rogue government agency operating out of a headquarters built by forces beyond human reckoning. They shouldn’t _have_ normal weeks.

Salvador, Marshall, and Tommasi all stand to leave, but Darling stays sitting. “One more thing,” he says, quietly. “It won’t take long.”

There’s the other shoe.

Tommasi shuts the door behind him, and they’re alone.

The greeting card Darling sets on Trench’s desk is banal and unassuming, but most Altered Items are. _You’re 11!_ it announces, aggressively cheerful, the text adrift in a colorful sea of balloons. A child would love it; Trench finds it exhausting just to look at. Maybe that’s its effect: making old men feel older. (The few relatives Trench still speaks with tell him he’s too young to call himself an old man, but they’ve never been responsible for the Bureau, never held its fate in faltering hands. Trench is the Board’s dog, the Bureau’s dog, and he ages like one.)

“Dylan Faden’s birthday is tomorrow,” Darling explains. “A card from you would mean a lot to him.”

The card is mundane, then, but Trench’s intuition was right: This conversation will drain years from him. “We’ve had this discussion,” he says, pinning Darling with an unimpressed look.

“You don’t have to deliver it in person,” Darling says quickly, nearly stumbling over the words. He fiddles with his bow tie. Before P6 was acquired, he wore them once a week at most; now, he wears them nearly every day. Dr. Ash would be proud to see his protege so deliberately drawing on the power of archetypes. “No interaction necessary. Just… write a few words about how proud you are of his progress, how happy the Bureau is to have him here. I think it would do wonders for his future progress.”

Trench is going to need something stronger than coffee for this, he decides, and he lights a cigarette for himself. Doesn’t offer one to Darling. “The Director shouldn’t need praise. It’s an endless, thankless grind. The only reward this work gives is more work.”

“He isn’t the Director, yet. He’s just a boy. An _impressionable_ boy. He knows we’re raising him to be the Director, but what does he know about how a Director behaves? Only what he sees from you.” Darling’s diction turns precise, each word enunciated. The same tone he uses in the informational videos Tommasi put him up to. Something from Saturday-morning PBS. More archetype.

“Then he’s learning an important lesson. The Director doesn’t have time for niceties.”

It’s a flimsy excuse, thinner than the smoke wafting through the air, and Darling sees right through it. “I know you don’t want to get close to him,” says Darling, matter-of-factly. He knows first-hand how Trench despises being pitied. “But I’m not asking you to. He’s a child, not a duckling. He won’t imprint on you just for giving him a birthday card.”

“I can’t get involved. I made that clear from the start.” Darling should understand. After Kate left, he was the one who picked up the mess. The one who dragged Trench out of the Oldest House, swearing and unshaven and reeking of whiskey, when he couldn’t return to his empty home; the one who booked the hotel; the one who covered for him with the rest of the management team. Of anyone at the Bureau, Darling knows why Trench can’t go down this road.

But still, Darling doesn’t relent. He leans forward, earnest as ever. “The Bureau is Dylan’s home, now. He can’t grow up thinking its leader hates him.”

That gives Trench pause. “P6 thinks I hate him?”

“Why wouldn’t he? Our only viable Prime Candidate — as far as he knows — and the current Director couldn’t find five minutes to visit him? Not once in ten months? That’s nonsense. He knows you’re deliberately ignoring him. He keeps asking me if you blame him for Jesse destroying the slides.”

“Tell him I don’t. They were children trying to protect themselves from an AWE. They didn’t understand what they were doing.”

“I’ve tried! Believe me, I’ve tried. Your absence speaks louder than anything I can say.”

Memories of Ordinary assert themselves: the rotting stench of the town dump; broken glass crunching underfoot; the slide Trench stole when Darling’s back was turned, for reasons he can’t explain. Maybe it’s guilt that makes him say, “Give me a pen.”  
  
Darling hands one over, grinning as bright as Northmoor when they shoved him into the NSC. “Thank you. This will mean the world to Dylan.”

Trench pauses, pen hovering above the card. He knows that tone of voice. Used it himself, when he still had a family, every time he said Susana. (He wrote six birthday cards for her, and never got to write a seventh.) “Casper,” says Trench, because this isn’t a Director speaking to his Head of Research. “Men in our position can’t afford the luxury of fatherhood.”

“I know that. Dylan is just a subject.”

“Then why do you keep using his name?”

Darling’s pause confirms Trench’s suspicions: he didn’t even realize he was doing it. “Habit, I suppose.” Darling doesn’t sound like he believes it himself. “I’ll... reduce my contact with P6, after tomorrow. Carla and Hubert can pick up the slack.”

Trench nods in approval. He writes an inscription on the card: generic but kind, and out of his mind as soon as the ink dries. He doesn’t want to remember what he wrote. A quick signature, and then he closes the card, slides it back to Darling’s side of the desk.

“Thank you,” says Darling, again. He stands, then leans across the desk to squeeze Trench’s shoulder. “Get some rest, okay? Doctor’s orders.”

“Wrong kind of doctor,” says Trench, without venom, and Darling laughs. It’s an old joke between them, from back when Trench was bottom-rung Security and Darling was a lowly Junior Researcher. A call-and-response. An incantation that means everything between them is exactly as it should be.


	2. Jesse

A glimmer of light rouses Jesse Faden from sleep, and even though she knows it’s useless, she buries her face under the pillows. “Five more minutes,” she mumbles into the fabric, squeezing her eyes shut. Since Ordinary, she’s slept in dozens of empty beds in empty rooms in empty houses that aren’t hers. This bed is one of the softest.

Another pulse of light behind her eyelids, brighter than the first. Jesse groans. Polaris doesn’t speak, not with words, but her meaning is clear: The house’s owners are coming home today. They need to leave soon, before any neighbors wake up, so they can slip away without getting caught.

Reluctantly, Jesse pulls her head out from under the pillows. The room is dark; the summer sun gets to sleep in longer than she does. Plastic stick-on stars glow green on the ceiling, just bright enough to be seen, but not bright enough to help her see anything else. “Is there time for breakfast?” Jesse asks hopefully, rolling out of bed. Her stomach backs her up with a growl.

Yes, answers Polaris, with her not-words.

Turning on the lights would tell the outside world that someone is home, so Jesse feels her way to the door in the dark, testing each step before she puts her foot down. The room’s owner left toys all over the floor when her family left for vacation: Polly Pockets, Bionicles, something that shouts when Jesse’s toe touches it. She freezes, foot hovering a few inches off the ground. Her heart thumps loud in her ears. It’s the Dung Monkeys, says a part of her. They’re coming. They’re _here_.

But the Dung Monkeys are long gone, Jesse reminds herself. They're stuck inside the slides, thanks to Polaris, and they aren't coming back. She makes herself keep moving forward. The thing that made the noise is just a Bop-It, and Jesse, at twelve years old, is way too old to let a toy scare her.

A dim emergency light illuminates the hallway, just barely. Jesse takes it out of the socket to use as a flashlight, and she keeps it pointed at the floor, trying not to look up at the pictures covering the walls. The family that owns this house is together, happy, whole. A mom and dad and kid smile down at Jesse from a dozen moments in time, arms around each other, like nothing will ever break them apart. Jesse has no pictures from Ordinary, but she tells herself she doesn’t need them. She still remembers Mom’s eye color. She still remembers the shape of Dad’s face.

And as long as she doesn’t try picturing them, she won’t have to admit that she’s lying.

Inside the kitchen, Jesse rifles through the fridge, covering the light with a hand to keep her eyes from losing night vision. A sliver escapes through the cracks between her fingers, spilling yellow like orange juice across the scuffed tile. She’s lucky, today: The house’s owners left half a carton of milk in the fridge before they went on vacation, and it’s still good. “Sorry about this,” she whispers, taking the milk and shutting the fridge.

Apologizing makes it feel less like stealing; makes her feel like less of a disappointment, even though Mom and Dad aren’t here to be disappointed. She wishes they were. If Dad walked through the door and grounded her until high school for all the stuff she’s done since Ordinary, she’d be the happiest kid alive. Once – after the adults disappeared, before the government men took Dylan – Jesse and Dylan spent a whole day using every swear word they knew, thinking Mom and Dad would have to come back to scold them.

Mom and Dad didn’t come back.

(Dylan blamed the Dung Monkeys for all of it. He didn’t know what Jesse wished for, the night before the adults vanished. He still doesn’t.)

Polaris glimmers in the corner of Jesse’s vision, tugging her eyes to the open pantry and her thoughts back to food. Right, she thinks at Polaris. Eat and get out of here. Sometimes, Jesse feels like Goldilocks: breaking into people’s homes, eating their food, sleeping in their beds. But Polaris is there to guide her, and they’re always long gone before the bears get home.

The pantry is even luckier than the fridge. Jesse grins at what she finds there: Cocoa Puffs and Apple Jacks and Lucky Charms. The cereal is on the second-top shelf, but Jesse’s grown since Ordinary, and she stands on tip-toe and tugs at the edge of the box until the Cocoa Puffs are hers. (Polaris points out the healthier Corn Flakes right next to them. Jesse ignores her, just this once. Who knows if the next house will have anything half as good?)

Jesse closes the pantry behind her, a habit her parents scolded into her by the time she was seven, and for the first time, she sees the calendar taped to the door. One week is crossed out in red: June 20th to June 26th. Polaris made her get up early because the house’s owners are coming back today, which means–

“Shit!” The box of Cocoa Puffs slips from Jesse’s hands, bursts open on the floor. Pieces of cereal roll under the table, under the fridge, but she doesn’t care. “Dylan’s birthday,” she says. Her own little brother’s birthday, and she almost forgot. What kind of big sister is she?

The kind who runs away, answers her brain. That’s what she is. She should have stayed with Dylan until they could escape together, but she left him behind. Dylan is spending his birthday alone, trapped in whatever prison the government men locked him in, and it’s her fault. It's all her fault. _Your brother is sensitive,_ Mom told her, once. _You have to look out for him. _Jesse promised her that she would.

She has to fix it. She’s _going_ to fix it. “We’re gonna find him,” Jesse says. “You and me, Polaris.”

Polaris shimmers in reply.


End file.
